The 2012 I/O developer conference revealed Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, made by Asus, today, and it is intriguing.
The various media giants have scoured the lands far and wide for a digital-wielding warrior capable of being an iPad killer.
And after three different generations Apple has managed to foil all attempts to cast them from the throne that has been crafted from the bones of defeated motherboards and tablet skeletons (don’t miss out on The Game of Thrones reference, folks).
Today at the keynote address, Google revealed its own champion and cast the Nexus 7 into the tablet melee that is currently dominated by the Amazon Kindle Fire, the Barnes & Nobles Nook Tablet, and Apple’s iPad.
To be fair, the success of the Fire and Nook tab are results of their being much cheaper products than Apple’s, and their features hold up very well, despite the fact that they do not wholly compare with the iPad.
This is important, because weighing in at 0.75 pounds, the Nexus 7 (named after the “Nexus 6” androids that Philip K. Dick invented in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and made cult famous by the movie version Blade Runner; and I hope Google’s paying someone for Dick’s innovation) is clearly meant to compete with the Fire and the Nook.
Not only that, but the Google Nexus 7 immediately makes the current Fire and Nook tablets obsolete with its Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) operating system, its 7-inch 1280×800-resolution touchscreen and its Quad-core Tegra 3 chipset with a 12-core graphics processor.
And all of that comes for just less than two hundred bucks!
Will this faceoff with the iPad or affect Apple sales? I certainly do not think so, but it has already leapfrogged the only other two moderate successes in the tablet field and created a lot of buzz in no time at all.
For all of you would be Nexus lovers, the $199 version of the Google Nexus 7 comes with 8GB of storage (the 16GB version is available for $249), a front-facing camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and nine hours of HD video playback.
[via Time]
